Colors & Contrast

Colors and contrasts can be used to help your map look wonderful,
or they could make your map look like trash. Both can also be used to
draw the players’ attention in the ways you want them to, as we
discussed earlier. In this lesson I want to go into a little more depth
of using colors and contrast on your maps, to improve the quality of
Art, and to utilize them effectively for the players’ benefits as well.

Contrast In Color

Colors of similar hues don’t contrast with each other – they don’t
clash. But colors of opposite hues do. Take a purple weapon and sit it
on a yellow table. It sticks out because the purple is at the opposite
end of the color wheel from the yellow.

Now take that same purple weapon and place it on a blue or red table.
It stands out far less. It blends in more. This is why the purple
leaves on Boardwalk work so well as soft cover – both red and blue teams
blend equally well behind the purple leaves, and both are just a little
noticeable behind the purple leaves.

Understanding the color wheel can help you understand how to maximize or minimize contrast for various colors.

The Purpose Of Contrast

Contrast is used in level design to attract or grab a player’s
attention to something important. It can be used to draw a player’s
attention to a power weapon or some important pickup. It could also be
used in a similar manner to draw a player’s attention to an open
doorway, as a visual cue to where they player should go next. The former
is used through out level design, the latter is used for campaign mode
rather than multiplayer mode.

Where there is contrast, there is attention grabbing. Where there is
no contrast, there is a lack of attention grabbing. Those areas that
lack contrast do not compete for the attention of the player. Therefore,
most of the map should lack contrast. This is why visual noise in
Architecture needs to be well controlled or it can wind up inadvertently
competing for the attention of the player where it should not.

Contrast can occur either through variation of intensity or variation
of color. For example, a black weapon on a white table is an example of
contrast of intensity, and a purple weapon on a yellow table is an
example of a contrast of color.

Managing Contrast

Since contrast should be avoided everywhere except where you want to
draw the player’s attention, you want to avoid contrast through out most
of your map. However, this doesn’t mean that the ceiling should be the
same color and texture as the walls or the walls the same as the floor.
This is exactly the problem with Halo 4’s Forge Island Blindness that is
created in the shadows when the ceiling, walls, and floor are all the
same color.

You really want the surfaces to differentiate from each other so that
when a player looks into a room they can immediately perceive the walls
from the floor and the ceiling. But at the same time you don’t want
this contrast to be significant enough to be grabbing the player’s
attention. You want the differences to be subtle, such as the same hue
of color, but a different shade or saturation; or just a slightly
different hue.

A more natural approach is to use a flooring material that looks like
flooring, a ceiling material that looks like ceiling, and wall material
that won’t class with either. Of course, this is dependent upon the
palette.

Once you establish the bulk of your map’s contrast level, you then
know how much to raise the contrast level to grab the player’s
attention. Hopefully the level through out most of your map is very low
in contrast – you wouldn’t need to go to extremes to grab a player’s
attention when you need to.

Summary

Colors can contrast as well as blend, you just need to decide what you want to achieve and with which colors.

Contrast can be from colors or from intensity.

Contrast is used to grab a player’s attention.

You need to minimize the contrast levels through out your map so that they don’t compete for the player’s attention.